About Leadpages

Founded in 2013, Leadpages has grown to help 50,000 businesses thrive through the addition of lead-generation tools to their marketing stack today. Innovative software drives sales through the creation of landing pages, pop-up windows, and subscriber opt-in links for use by solopreneurs to corporate behemoths.

At Leadpages, big data means big results for customers who need to collect sales leads from around the web. Leadpages harnesses a wide array of cross-platform data to optimize different types of lead-generation tools. For example, a customer can discover which webinar signup landing pages outperform others in the industry by tapping into insights from thousands of other businesses. This analysis involves billions of data points from tens of thousands of customers, which ultimately leads them to use the landing pages with the highest conversion rates every time.

While adding 100GB of data weekly, delivers data-powered tools faster at less cost

Leadpages used multiple data storage mechanisms to handle all this data, but as it grew, a more organized, central solution was in order. Concerns about security and reliability grew along with the magnitude of data. The Leadpages team also wanted to pull metrics from all these objects, including customers’ webpages, images, embed scripts, videos, and other assets, as well as analyze them to optimize customer recommendations. They needed a storage and development solution that could handle rapid growth.

The Leadpages team also needed a high-quality, cost-effective platform to build its software and apps without requiring them to invest in server management or highly specialized IT staff.

“With Leadpages hosted on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its own websites and network, our customers don’t worry about our reliability.”

—Clay Collins, Co-founder, Leadpages

Speed development and handle scale

After evaluating multiple cloud platforms, the team chose Google Cloud Platform based on cost efficiency and features. Google App Engine was fast and easy to implement: Leadpages launched its software after only 2 months of development. With about 10,000 users at the time, the monthly bill from Google App Engine was less than a quarter of what it would have been with a different solution. “I absolutely believe Google App Engine is part of the reason our company was able to get off the ground in the time span we did,” says Chris Arnold, Senior Manager of Engineering at Leadpages. “We didn’t have to build a DevOps organization with engineers to manage our deployments and infrastructure.”

In the beginning, deployments to Google App Engine were simple. Google provided all the APIs, Libraries, and infrastructure Leadpages needed. As Leadpages achieved sustained growth, additional Google services were folded into the overall strategy. Google Compute Engine, and later Google Kubernetes Engine, were used to scale up microservices around Google App Engine.

With Google Cloud Storage, Leadpages could get speed and performance at scale, with Google Compute Engine doing the heavy analytical lifting. Because of Google’s elastic scalability, there was no need to worry about hardware purchasing or hitting storage limits as data grew. And Leadpages didn’t need to hire a DevOps engineer with a six-figure salary to manage infrastructure.

Thanks to the flexibility of the Google Cloud APIs, Leadpages also gained efficiency by using Google Cloud Datastore with Firebase as a direct-access keystore so the front end to directly access storage instead of reaching out through the APIs each time.

“We had billions of dollars’ worth of Google infrastructure at our fingertips at a very minimal cost,” says Clay Collins, Co-founder of Leadpages.

“Google Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes have been a huge, huge thing for us. Google lets us deploy more than 40 separate microservices to a single cluster of VMs, and scale our features to customers without scaling our costs way up.”

—Chris Arnold, Senior Manager of Engineering, Leadpages

Quality app experiences

Leadpages’ customers really care about the performance of their landing pages—in fact, slow performance can hurt conversion rates. When you speed up a page load by just one second, conversion rates go up by 7%. Leadpages saw speeds increase by as much as 56% when using Google Cloud Platform, even before optimizing its servers.

They also have high security and uptime. “With Leadpages hosted on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its own websites and network, our customers don’t worry about our reliability,” says Clay.

With Google Cloud Storage, the team can affordably store data that helps guide its customers in future lead generation efforts. Leadpages stores about 100GB of data every week, constantly increasing the demand on infrastructure.

Leadpages doesn’t just store all this data—it also makes much of it available to users. This year, the platform overhauled its analytics and A/B-testing experience, which lets marketers check and compare conversion rates for their landing pages in real time. Customers can also use a unique (and data-intensive) “sort by conversion rate” feature to help choose from hundreds of landing page templates. Google Compute Engine is powering these experiences so the new features stay responsive at scale.

Using Google App Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine, Leadpages can bring new features to customers faster. “Google Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes have also been a huge, huge thing for us,” adds Chris. “Google lets us deploy more than 40 separate microservices to a single cluster of VMs, and scale our features to customers without scaling our costs way up.”

Because Google App Engine takes care of the test environment setup, development teams can focus on testing and debugging to improve the software. And because storage and compute resources scale with growth, customers can rely on a solid, responsive website experience.

About Leadpages

Founded in 2013, Leadpages has grown to help 50,000 businesses thrive through the addition of lead-generation tools to their marketing stack today. Innovative software drives sales through the creation of landing pages, pop-up windows, and subscriber opt-in links for use by solopreneurs to corporate behemoths.